Tag: Background Tasks

Not only do newer versions of Android give users control over granting each permission to an app that requests it, thus slowing down privilege escalation attacks that have been possible in the past. But Android 7.1 actually rolls back permissions, which have been granted in the past. When we upgrade, the apps are optimized in such a way that many of their permissions default to Not Granted, until an effort is made by the user to Grant Them.

Further, since version 6.0.1 , Android has a feature called Doze. What it seems to do is cancel alarms which apps had set, to wake themselves again in the background. It cuts down significantly on the battery consumption of a fully up-to-date Google Pixel C.

Unfortunately, this also interferes with how the email apps Kaiten and K-9 work, which try to poll the email servers at regular, user-configured intervals, but which eventually stall in their older way of doing so, instead displaying the message ‘Sync Disabled’. On my own Pixel C, I have had to whitelist the Kaiten app, to exclude it from Battery Optimization manually, so that now it is fetching emails from the server again.